And now for something completely different: Superintelligence and the social sciences

by Sebastian Benthall

This semester I’ll be co-organizing, with Mahendra Prasad, a seminar on the subject of “Superintelligence and the Social Sciences”.

How I managed to find myself in this role is a bit of a long story. But as I’ve had a longstanding curiosity about this topic, I am glad to be putting energy into the seminar. It’s a great opportunity to get exposure to some of the very interesting work done by MIRI on this subject. It’s also a chance to thoroughly investigate (and critique) Bostrom’s book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies.

I find the subject matter perplexing because in many ways it forces the very cultural and intellectual clash that I’ve been preoccupied with elsewhere on this blog: the failure of social scientists and engineers to communicate. Or, perhaps, the failure of qualitative researchers and quantitative researchers to communicate. Whatever you want to call it.

Broadly, the question at stake is: what impact will artificial intelligence have on society? This question is already misleading since in the imagination of most people who haven’t been trained in the subject, “artificial intelligence” refers to something of a science fiction scenario, whereas to practitioner, “artificial intelligence” is, basically, just software. Just as the press went wild last year speculating about “algorithms”, by which it meant software, so too is the press excited about artificial intelligence, which is just software.

But the concern that software is responsible for more and more of the activity in the world and that it is in a sense “smarter than us”, and especially the fear that it might become vastly smarter than us (i.e. turning into what Bostrom calls a “superintelligence”), is pervasive enough to drive research funding into topics like “AI Safety”. It also is apparently inspiring legal study into the regulation of autonomous systems. It may also have implications for what is called, vaguely, “social science”, though increasingly it seems like nobody really knows what that is.

There is a serious epistemological problem here. Some researchers are trying to predict or forewarn the societal impact of agents that are by assumption beyond their comprehension on the premise that they may come into existence at any moment.